OAKLAND, Calif. — The Golden State Warriors are in the N.B.A. finals for the first time since 1975, playing Games 1 and 2 in the same arena they called home 40 years ago.

Back then, though, the Warriors did not have home-court advantage in the championship series against the Washington Bullets. They did not even have a home court, foiled by a scheduling conflict with the Ice Follies, a touring skating show, that forced the games to be moved to a different Bay Area arena.

“That’s why it’s the biggest upset in the N.B.A. finals,” Rick Barry, the star of that Warriors team, said in a phone interview. “Even in our own arena, they were scheduling other things in the spring. They didn’t even think we would be there.”

It remains one of the last examples of a professional sport not getting its way in the battleground of popular culture.

In 1975, the Ice Follies had its annual 10-day run in Oakland, scheduled in May, featuring the Olympic skater Janet Lynn, Big Bird and “a contingent of Muppet characters from Sesame Street,” an advertisement proclaimed in local newspapers. Tickets were $4.50 to $6.50, a dollar less for children.

“The Ice Follies have appeared here every year since 1967,” Bill Cunningham, the Oakland Coliseum complex general manager, told the Oakland Tribune columnist Ed Levitt when the conflict loomed. “That’s 60,000 to 70,000 people coming to the Oakland Arena for one week. We can’t suddenly decide to bump these people.”

So instead, the N.B.A., the Warriors and their fans were bumped.

“We had hoped that the N.B.A. would fit the dates when the arena is available,” Cunningham explained in words that still apply, “but TV calls the shots.”

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From left, the Warriors’ Charles Johnson, Clifford Ray and Keith Wilkes in the 1975 finals at the Cow Palace.CreditAssociated Press

In those days, the N.B.A.’s now-familiar 2-2-1-1-1, best-of-seven format for alternating home games was not rigid. In the 1975 Western Conference finals against Chicago, Golden State played Games 1, 4, 5 and 7 at home, in Oakland. In the Eastern finals, the Bullets and the Boston Celtics alternated home games, traveling between each one.

For the championship series, the Bullets, with home-court advantage because of their better regular-season record, were given a choice: play Game 1 on the road in Oakland before returning home, or start the series at home but play Games 2 and 3 on the road at the Cow Palace in Daly City, at the southern edge of San Francisco. It was where the Warriors, as the San Francisco Warriors, had spent most of the 1960s.

The heavily favored Bullets chose to start at home, then lost Game 1.

It is impossible to imagine the apocalyptic response these days if something as sacred as an N.B.A. finals had to be moved from a team’s home arena to accommodate something like an ice show. But in 1975, it was barely news. A few Bay Area newspapers wrote about it, but the location change was little more than a sentence or two in most articles about the series.

The Warriors did not complain much. At the Cow Palace, Barry scored 36 points in Game 2 and 38 in Game 3, both Golden State victories.

“The place was a rat hole, but I liked the baskets at the Cow Palace,” Barry said. “They were like sewer pipes. Rims then didn’t have springs, but the rims there were very forgiving.”

The Warriors finished the four-game sweep back in Landover, Md., where Games 5 and 7 were scheduled, too. Had the series reached a Game 6, it would have played been in Oakland, after the Ice Follies had moved on.

Instead, after the Warriors won Game 4, the team plane returned to California. According to newspaper accounts, the airport in San Francisco was so overrun by fans that the plane was diverted — fittingly, to Oakland.

By fluke and Follies, then, Thursday’s game was the first N.B.A. finals game at the Oakland arena (named Oracle Arena a few years ago) in its nearly 50-year history.

The Cow Palace, opened in 1941 with livestock shows primarily in mind, hosted many of the area’s biggest events for decades. It hosted the 1960 Final Four and the 1967 N.B.A. All-Star Game. In 1964, it hosted a Beatles concert and, as it did eight years earlier, the Republican National Convention.

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Phil Chenier of the Washington Bullets during Game 3 of the 1975 N.B.A. finals. The Bullets hosted Game 1 of the finals but played Games 2 and 3 on the road at the Cow Palace.CreditAssociated Press

It is still there, hosting an annual rodeo, circuses and the occasional ice show. (Scheduled at the Cow Palace this month: Crossroads of the West Gun Show and High Times Cannabis Cup, billed as the world’s leading marijuana trade show.)

The Warriors moved from Philadelphia to take up residence at the Cow Palace in 1962. They played there for most of the decade, except for two seasons at San Francisco Civic Auditorium. When the Warriors reached the finals (and lost) in 1964 and 1967, they played their games at the Cow Palace.

Across the bay in Oakland, the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena opened in 1966. It attracted an N.H.L. expansion team, the Oakland Seals. A year later, its tenants included an inaugural American Basketball Association franchise, the Oakland Oaks.

The Warriors filled in a few open dates on the calendar at the gleaming arena, even playing 18 home games there during the 1967-68 season. By then, the Warriors had already bounced between arenas in the postseason, where schedules are impossible to predict, and teams of the era had to work around the likes of circuses and ice shows.

The Warriors opened the 1967 playoffs in Oakland against the Los Angeles Lakers, but they played the rest of their home games at home, across the bay, on the way to losing the championship series to the Philadelphia 76ers.

In a 1968 playoff series with the St. Louis Hawks, Game 3 was in San Francisco (according to box scores, not delineating between Daly City and San Francisco), while Game 4 was in Oakland. The Warriors clinched the series by winning Game 6 in San Francisco.

The Warriors settled in Oakland in 1971 and rechristened themselves the Golden State Warriors. They discontinued the habit of bouncing between arenas for home games, at least until they made an unpredictably deep run in the 1975 playoffs.

“We’re sorry for the fans if they should have to go another place to see the Warriors play,” Cunningham, the arena general manager, said that May. “We don’t like losing business. But when you have a multipurpose arena, you’ve got to please the greatest number of people. After all these years, I can’t tell the Ice Follies I don’t want them here.”

Within a few years, the Ice Follies were extinct. The Warriors, though, are still in the old arena, welcomed home for the N.B.A. finals, 40 years removed from their removal.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SP8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Coming-Home Party 40 Years in the Making. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe